November 09, 2018

“Built to outcomfort and overlast,” from Woodard, an outdoor furniture company. (Why not overlast and outcomfort?) Hat tip: Andy Behr, who saw this ad in the November issue of House Beautiful.

“Out-deliver. Out-delight. Out-disrupt” on the Informatica home page. (Mere disruption no longer suffices; now it has to be out-disruption.) I saw the same message on an Informatica billboard at a San Francisco approach to the Bay Bridge.

Informatica is everywhere.

Out-innovate! Out-perform! Out-impossible! Can we just call them InformOUTica?

September 20, 2018

Mountain Dew, the neon-yellow-green soft drink brand owned by PepsiCo, evidently failed to consult anyone in Scotland before it introduced its new ad slogan, “Epic thrills start with a chug.” If it had, it would have learned that chug is Scottish slang for masturbate. (Jelisa Castrodale for Vice, via Language Log)

That word: It does not mean what you think it means. Not in Scotland, anyway. (Via @jaysebro)

June 28, 2018

Welcome to 2018, when a U.S. president takes to Twitter to threaten a 115-year-old American company that it will be “taxed like never before!” in retaliation for the company’s decision to move some production to Europe. The decision came after the European Union imposed a 31 percent tariff on imported motorcycles in response to the president’s new unilateral tariffs on imported steel and aluminum.

The company is Harley-Davidson, founded in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1903 and still headquartered there.

A 1912 ad for Harley-Davidson, modestly touting “the motorcycle that is not uncomfortable.”

The meaning of the Harley-Davidson name is right there on the surface: The company was founded by William S. Harley and brothers Arthur and Walter Davidson back when naming companies after yourself was standard operating procedure. But there’s plenty of other Harley-Davidson naming lore that makes for good reading.

Harley-Davidson’s current advertising slogan, “All for Freedom, Freedom for All,” introduced in 2017, acquired a little extra nuance this week.

June 08, 2018

You’ve probably seen the emoticon, a stripped-down rendering of a half-smiling skeptic.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The symbol’s official name is shruggie (or, alternatively, smugshrug). In an appreciation published in The Awl in 2014, Kyle Chayka noted that it could be used to express nihilism or “bemused resignation,” and was even “a Zen-like tool to accept the chaos of universe.”

I’m seeing the shadow of a shruggie in a new generation of ads whose dominant feature is a copy-intensive combination of insolence and indifference. The ads are aimed at digital natives – people under 35 – yet appear in traditional non-digital media: print magazines, public transit. Their grim forerunner, now 18 months old, is the Fiverr campaign, which I wrote about last year, calling it “mean spirited”; the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino went further and called it “dystopian.” The current crop is slightly less cynical but still snarky and smug with a hint of that existential shrug.

May 24, 2018

On a recent trip to Costco I bought a box of RXBAR protein bars, which contain several healthful ingredients, none of which, according to the package, is bullshit. Good to know!

From the RXBAR website:

Guys who are into CrossFit would never indulge in B.S.

As you probably know from my periodic appearances in Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing, I’m constantly on the lookout for sweary brand names and slogans. When I saw “No B.S.” on the RXBAR box, I remembered a similarly frank promise made earlier this year by Everlane, the “radical transparency” retailer.